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Czernowin on CD

The music of Chaya Czernowin, whose immensely powerful new opera Infinite Now I review in this week's issue of The New Yorker, is well represented on records. At the center of her discography are four discs on the Mode label: Afatsim, which gathers scores from the earlier part of her career, running from the bass-flute piece Ina of 1988 to the title work of 1996; Shu Hai practices javelin, which presents three settings of poetry of Zohar Eitan from the period 1997 to 2001; Pnima...ins innere, a DVD of her extraordinary first opera, on the theme of the inexpressibility of the trauma of the Holocaust; and MAIM (2002-6), her vast symphonic trilogy on the theme of water, which Tim Rutherford-Johnson rightly describes in Music After the Fall as "one of the most significant orchestral works of the new century." Picking up the chronological narrative is a recent Wergo disc that offers another orchestral trilogy — The Quiet, Zohar Iver, and Esh — alongside the guitar concerto White Wind Waiting and the unearthly beautiful At the Fringe of Our Gaze, written for Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Also on Wergo is Shifting Gravity, featuring the 2008 chamber cycle of that name. Arriving soon from Kairos is a selection of Czernowin's Wintersongs cycle, based on an ICE performance that I previewed in The New Yorker in 2014. Finally, DG has a DVD of Adama, the theatre piece that Czernowin wrote as an interstitial counterpoint to Mozart's unfinished Zaide. (Next month Theater Freiburg will première a new choral version of Adama.) More can be found on YouTube, including Knights of the Strange, Ayre, and Pilgerfahrten. As for Infinite Now, it travels in coming weeks to the Mannheim National Theatre (May 26 to June 18) and to the Paris Philharmonie (June 14). Czernowin is now looking ahead to her next operatic project – a love story, she says.

As I note in passing in The New Yorker, Czernowin is also an influential teacher of composition — as is her husband, the formidable experimental composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi. (I missed my chance to see his wild Coney Island-inspired spectacle Sideshow live — Zoë Madonna and Mark Swed supplied enticingly perplexing descriptions — but I've been listening to an audio version on his website.) Although she resists the idea of a Czernowin Schule, her pupils at Harvard and elsewhere — Ashley Fure, Stefan Prins, Trevor Bača, Michelle Lou, and Ann Cleare, among others — have plainly learned much from her in the art of deploying advanced techniques toward viscerally expressive ends. (Lou and Bača have both written perceptively about her music.) Many of them were present in Gent for Infinite Now — appropriately so, since the score bears the dedication "To my students."